Back in Bø

The rest of London was fine, and I was glad to get to see the Sutton Hoo burial display at the British Museum.  I was glad to get out of the big city and be back in rural Norway.  Getting back to Bø was not as easy as we thought it might be.  When we got to the airport it turned out that there were no trains going that far, and the only bus going to Bø was leaving from Notodden and we couldn't get there in time to make it.  So what we did was take a train to Skien, and then walked across the WHOLE city (the train station was not on the side of the town that we needed to be on) and then headed out on highway 36, hitchhiking to Bø.  We actually didn't have to go very far before a nice, what looked like retired, couple picked us up.  They said that they were only going to Ulefoss, but decided that they had to drive us not only all the way to Bø, but to our respective dorms!  They were very very nice.  It was a pleasant surprise since we had made up our minds that we were going to just walk all the way back to Bø.  

Since I've been back in Bø I've mostly just been trying to hang out with everybody before they leave.  Chenoa and Heather are gone, as well as Teddi and Esther.  Most of the international students are gone as well.  The Americans left are me, Gustie, Adam, Sarah and Nichole.  We've been having communal dinners to try to get rid of all of the food that we have left.  

I just finished watching all of the seasons of Seinfeld, and am working on reading a couple of books while I'm still here.  I have been trying to read bits of the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and The Children of Hurin, all in bokmål.  I have also sort of started the nynorsk translation of the Lord of the Rings, which is very interesting.  In the translator's comments, it is noted that Tolkien, who claims to be translating the story from an ancient lost document (a method known as "pseudo-translation"), has dimmed down the dialectal variation amongst the characters.  The translator says that he has actually made the variation larger than Tolkien allowed it to be, due to the fact that there is enormous dialectal variation in Norway, and that it is more easily understood by the entire Norwegian speaking population (employing obscure dialectal English words would have made reading LotR very difficult indeed).  So, reading this translation will be very fun and challenging.  

In addition to reading, I have also been doing a fair share of flyfishing.  Last week I went down to the sports store and asked what some good flies were for the area, and I was suggested three.  One was a sort of elk-hair-caddis streamer, another was like a royal wulf, but with brown wings, and another was a sort of mayfly imitation it looked like, with wrapped with green thread around the hook.  This last one has been the most successful one (I actually haven't caught anything on the other ones, though I lost the caddis pretty fast), and I bought three more this week.  Here are some fishing pictures.  I'm particularly proud of the first fish in the series, because I caught him using my recently acquired yet poorly executed roll-cast.  It's a cast used when there are trees right behind you and you are unable to do the typical back-and-forth casting used for flyfishing.  

Maldon

The next day I thought that I would take a trip out of the big city to see something that was on the top of my list.  That would be the city of Maldon, near which a battle being the source for one of the most important Old English poems (fragment of a poem really) took place.  The battle of Maldon took place on August 10th 991, alongside the river Blackwater.  There was a group of vikings who had camped at Northey Island and were attempting to raid the area.  Beorhtnoth, the Ealdorman of Essex led the defending English forces from the south bank of the Blackwater.  Rather than try to pay a ransom immediately to try to pay off the vikings, he told their messenger that he would rather fight than cowardly hand over treasure.  Later when the tide had gone out, in his "overmastering pride", he gave too much land for the vikings to fight on.                

Ðā se eorl ongan for his ofermōde
ālȳfan landes tō fela lāþere ðēode.
Ongan ċeallian þā ofe cald wæter
Byrhtelmes bearn(beornas ġehlyston):
"Nū ēow is ġerȳmed; gāð riċene tō ūs,
guman tō gūþe. God ān wāt
hwā þǣre wælstōwe wealdan mōte."

Then the earl began in all his pride
to give too much land to the hateful people.
He began to call then over the cald water,
Byrhthelmes son, warriors listened:
"Now the way is cleared for you all; come quickly to us,
men to battle, God alone knows
who can wield the battlefield."

Well, the battle did not end well for the English.  Byrhtnoth died, and so did his men defending him.  The famous lines at the end of the poem are thought to capture the northern spirit of fighting to the last defending or avenging your lord.  

"Hige sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre,

mōd sceal þē māre, þē ūre mægen lȳtlað."

Thought shall be harder, heart the keener,

spirit shall be more, as our might lessens.

There wasn't actually too much to see in Maldon.  There was a statue of Byrhtnoth with some information about the battle.

Then I took a walk on a dike alongside the river to where the causeway was, and where the battle most likely happened.  

It was a beautiful day out, so I sat on the dike and ate lunch, sadly, where all of the English fought and died over a thousand years ago.  Then I made my way back to meet Chenoa and Trygve in London, and to see some museums.

England III / London

From Cornwall we took the train clear across England to London, during which I continued to work on the book that I had been reading by Arne Zettersten, a Swede (it's in Swedish), which was about his impressions about Tolkien by his meetings and work with Tolkien.  I read a lot that I had read before, but there were of course new and neat things to be learned.  I also used the book as a flat and quite surface to play dice on.  Once in London the first thing to do was meet Chenoa's friend Trygve, who is American, has a very Norwegian name, and was in Norway this semester.  The only thing that we did on the first night was eat Indian food, which I had never eaten before.  I literally had no idea what a single thing on the menu meant.  So what we did was basically go on what the waiter (who was very nice) recommended.  The food was fantastic, and then I was stuffed and ready to go to bed back at the hostel.  The next day we had plenty of sight seeing ahead of us, which sounded nice, but at the same time, exhausting, which it proved to be.  We did the Tower Bridge tour thing, which was fairly cool.  We got a great view of the most disgusting river I've ever seen in my life, the Thames; but we also got to see a fair bit of London from that high.  We did quite a bit of walking along what I think is called the Queen's walk or something along those lines.  There were tons of street performers, good bad and unmentionable.  Trygve made the appropriate observation that it really is amazing what some people can think up.  For instance one of the guys was just painted(?) all blue and playing a blue accoustic guitar.  We saw Westminster and Parliament.  I am of the opinion that they are absolutely two of the neatest buildings in London.  Probably the most beautiful was St Paul's Cathedral.  Apparently I took no pictures of it, though I was sure that I had.  We saw and heard the St Olaf Choir there, which was one of the most beautiful things ever.  I had never heard a choir in a cathedral before.  I really can't say much other than it really was one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.  

Now, I must say that I've always enjoyed Shakespeare, but just not been thrilled about him; but, one of the best experiences of London was seeing "The Comedy of Errors" at the replica of the Globe Theatre.  I say replica, though it can't be an exact replica.  It is however thought to be fairly accurate.  The play was, at any rate, hilarious.  The humour was very slapstick and light, which was good after an exhausting day.  The whole comedy is based on the errors made when two pairs of twins, sharing the same names (Antipholus and Dromio) end up in the same town and create a stir.  In this case, there were not four actors to play the four characters, but rather two actors played both twins.  They took off their glasses to indicate that they were one or other of the twins.  At the end when all four met in the same place at the same time (for the first time) there were life-size cut-outs of the actors to be the other twins, which was very funny.  To wrap it up, it was without a doubt the most fun I have ever had at a play.  With our feet and backs exhausted we headed back to the hostel for rest up before another day.  

England II

(English, Cornish, German, Italian, French, Spanish)

From Oxford we took the train to Bath where we spent the next night.  Bath was a very touristy town, but nice nonetheless.  There was a fantastically old Cathedral, and typical big city things.  One cool thing was that we got to see Stonehenge.  Stonehenge is a short bus-ride outside of Bath.

From Bath we took a train to Exeter where all we did was sleep, and then took off in the morning to go to Penzance in Cornwall.  I was looking forward to this as the Annear's are Cornish.  I found the old country to be a bit touristy in places, but where isn't?  It was beautiful even though I felt like an outsider.  The main thing that we did was go to Land's End (or Penn an Wlas in Cornish) where there was plenty of hiking along the coast.  It's also the most westerly point of England, and there were plenty of cheesey signs saying first/last whatever of England.  This picture is the western bank of the Tamar river, the border of Cornwall.

Now I'll just show a bunch of pictures from Land's End and the trip there.

We stayed at a bed and breakfast that night (there was almost nothing available! YMCA and Hostel were booked), and had a wonderful breakfast the next (rainy) morning before heading over to St. Michael's Mount, where there is a castle owned by and home of the St. Aubyn family.  It was a very misty/rainy/celtic feeling morning.

England!

So our trip to England, we knew, would start with a train to Oxford to meet up with some friends that I knew via Tolkien nerdiness.  We met up at the Eagle and the Child where C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and other Inklings met up to read, eat, drink, and discuss (most often) each others yet unpublished works.  The second and third pictures in this post are from the room within that they always sat in.  From there we walked and drove around Oxford.  The fourth picture from the top is of the Blue Plaque saying that Tolkien had lived in that house.  He lived at 20 Northmoor Road from 1930 to 1947.  The Hobbit and the majority of the Lord of the Rings were written while he lived here.  After that we visited Tolkien and his wife Edith's grave.  The final stop on the Tolkien tour through Oxford was the Botanical Gardens run by the university.  When Tolkien lived on Merton Road (right behind the the gardens, where he could see them from his window) during the last few years of his life he had a key to the gardens, and go enter when he wanted.  My last picture here is of his favorite tree, and the site of the last picture that we have of him.  The tree is a Pinus Nigra, the Austrian Pine.  This was a fantastic day, one of the best this year.

Syttende mai!

Short text, more pictures is how this post is gonna be.  The 17th of May celebrates when Norway got their own constitution on May 17th 1814.  It is not their independence day, because shortly after the aforementioned date they went into a union with/under Sweden.  Their independence day came in 1905 when they became a sovereign nation and got their own king.  My pictures are from Oslo where we spend 17.mai this year.  

p.s. we saw a lot of Peruvian flute bands.

In this picture (which is hard to see), there is the Royal Family.  On the right side, between the two columns, there is the crown prince Haakon, behind him is his wife Mette-Marit, and to their left, and our right, are the king and queen, Harald V and Sonja.

Fishing, and fish at last

Last Wednesday I decided to go and give the small crick that feeds the Bø river a shot.  I started from where the two rivers meet, and walked the smaller one up to a bridge a ways upstream.  It is a beautiful little stream, though mostly flowing down hill and very rocky.  Like many steams like this, I expected that if I could make accurate casts to the places I needed to cast to that I would then catch some fish.  Such was not the case.  I did not even get a hit, on fly or spinner.  So I'm left to conclude that there are either no trout in this stream, or that I'm using the wrong fly (and after seeing what type of insects there were around the stream, I must say that my fly did not resemble them).  It was a little weird not to catch anything on my spinner though.  It was a pleasant morning, though my feet were numb by the time I reached the bridge because I had been wading, yet I have no waders in Norway.  That means that I'm truly apart of the river, temperature and all.  At the bridge (or under rather) I sat down to let my feet warm up and my foot coverings dry off.  I also thought that I'd better do some reading for my literature test that was coming up on Friday.  

The coming Sunday I decided to go up to the lakes and give that a shot; I clearly hadn't been catching anything in the flowing water, so I might as well try something new.  Chenoa and I decided to bring some supplies to cook a fish with, supposing that I caught something, and it's a good thing that we did.  We worked our way around one side of the lake, the sunny side, and I was fishing with Rappala's version of the Rattle trap, a lure that looks like a small fish and has little beads in it that rattle.  At a narrow area between to larger parts of the lake, I got my prize (long overdue in my opinion, but I'm not complaining).  Fishing with the rattle rap I wasn't sure what I was going to pull out of the lake.  It's a pretty versatile lure, and I had no idea what was in there, though I thought that there might be some trout.  Despite using an eight foot pole and heavy line, I could still feel the trout fairly well on the end of my line, which was good.  The fighting style was familiar, and as it got closer, I could see that it was indeed a trout, the European trout, the brown trout.  It measured about thirteen and a half inches, and was fullbodied and dark coloured.  I tried to see if I couldn't catch a few more, and I couldn't.  So we started a fire a little ways from where I caught it, and we cooked it and ate it right there.  No butter, no spices, just trout, and it was delicious.

It's May

Well it is May, and it's been a while since I've let anybody know what I've done since Påskeferie.  Classes are winding down, in fact I'm done with one!  My writing workshop class is finished.  I wrapped up my final draft of my semester paper as well as some other minor assignments that we did throughout the semester last week.  The only things I have left are the Litt exam this Friday (I'm really hoping to be able to write my exam about fantasy literature, which is the last topic that we covered) and Norwegian, which I don't think will be tooo bad.  I've also got to write a paper which is due on the fourteenth, and I'm sure I'll procrastinate with it since it is the only thing I have to do in English.  

Besides schoolwork I've been skating a lot, and I foresee a lot of fishing as well.  There were some guys who made a box about 1 foot high and 8 feet long and put metal edges on it so that we could grind it.  It's just kept by the tennis courts, so I pull it out about everday and skate it, which has been great.  I usually either skate with Kjetil or Espen (and Espen's friends), or otherwise by myself.  Last night after some skating I played a Norwegian (at least it was in Norwegian) board game called Passport.  You pretty much just went around the board answering trivia about various countries around the world, trying to get a stamp for every continent.  It actually took forever, and we quit before anybody won, but it was a good time.  I also tried some new Norwegian chocolate, "Daim" bars, which was like chocolate with something similar to toffee chunks in the middle.  

I fished the other day and didn't catch a dang thing, which I am getting sick of.  I think on Wednesday I am going to wake up quite early and head to the river (actually a little river that feeds the big river) and try to see if I can't catch something.  My last attempt to catch a fish was fairly poor, and I'm determined to get something, so I'll wade as much of the river as I can so see what happens.  

On Wednesday this week we are going up to Torun's house for coffee, tea, and cakes.  She is our Writing Workshop teacher, and wanted to have us over for a sort of end of the semester get together, and to give us our papers back with comments.  After that it will be nothing but studying for the exam on Friday.  So I probably will post my next thing on Friday with some impressions about how I think the exam went.  

Påskeferie, andre delen

The second half of Easter break.  

So after we were done in Sunnmøre, it was just to drive up to Trondheim.  This didn't take as long as it took to get to Stranda, thank goodness.  It was, furthermore, a very pretty drive!  Were were recommended to take the Atlantic Sea Road, which was great.  This is basically just a road that is on the veeeeery edge of Norway, and really is out in the Ocean.  So we stopped and ate lunch here, and played at the edge of the ocean.

There were people out fishing in these strong currents that I'm sure were caused by the tides, and resembled mælstroms, sort of.  

You can see here the current going out to the ocean, and an old guy tryin his hand at catchin a fish.  I didn't see anybody catch anything, unfortunately for all of us.  

We got to Trondheim fairly late that night, so we just looked for a hotel, which was not hard to find, and called it a night.  We ended up staying at the Comfort Hotell right downtown, and it felt great to have a room all to ourselves (that is we weren't staying with anyone and felt like we could just do whatever).  The hotel included breakfast in the morning and waffles in the evening, which was great, and we totally took advantage of.  The hotel put us very close to Nidaros Domkirke, the famous cathedral in Trondheim:

Heather and Chad went up to Stjørdal the second day, which left me and Gustie to wander around Trondheim for a day or two, during which we watched a Norwegian scary movie, walked around Trondheim and saw an old fort, and explored the harbour area.

After Trondheim we stayed in a smalll town called Støren for two nights, during which we ate Hawaiian pizza, watched a couple of movies on tv, walked around, and went for a hike that almost killed Gustie.  She didn't actually almost die, but she did slide off a small cliff/dropoff.  There was what I would liken to a moss covered slide that was a bout 6-8 feet long, steep, and leading to a 5 or so foot dropoff, with a steep and snow-covered landing.  I snuck around the side of it, holding on to saplings.  As Gustie was trying to do this she slipped, slid down the slide, got air off the small cliff, landed on the steep snow and kept sliding fast for a short distance before some soft deep snow stopped her.  She was seriously scared the rest of the hike, but I kept reminding her that she was the one who wanted to go down that way (as opposed to the steep slope covered in loose rocks that we climbed up).  Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera, and so don't have any evidence to show you guys.  

After our very wild hike, we were thrilled to be back in our hotel room, able to chill, sleep, read, and watch tv before being picked up by Heather and Chad in the morning.  The drive home was pretty chill until about 11:00 a.m., when everybody decided to drive home from their cabins at the same time, packing the roads, and slowing us down a bit no doubt.  Once home (after a drive that went entirely faster than any of the previous chunks) I made a very starchy dinner of french fries and boiled potatoes, and settled in.  Our trip was beautiful and fantastic, but nonetheless, it felt wonderful to be back.